This Last House

A Retirement Memoir

Janis P. Stout

Publication Year: 2010

Janis Stout tackles the memoir with a new and inventive approach—she organizes her memories around the houses she’s lived in. ““I picture my life as a long row of houses.” Houses are metaphors for the structures of our lives, and Stout’s houses twine their way along with reflections on work and retirement, marriage, and quietness for engaging in the important last work of life.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Thank you, Charles Rowell, for telling me, when I
retired, that I ought to write a book about it. Thank
you, Deborah Williams, for reading that talky first
draft and saying, “It needs more story.” Thank you, Trey Hammond,
for reading a revised version of the first draft and finding things in it
to praise; ...

Introduction: Finding Prickly Ridge

One January day in 1997 my husband and I clambered
up and over a steep slope at the side of a dirt road
in New Mexico and stood for the first time on the land
where we would build our house for retirement. ...

Part One: Remembrance of Houses Past

Chapter One: The Rock House on Richardson Street

Orange-brown rock walls. Steep gables. Sometimes
green, sometimes brown wood trim. This is the house of
my Fort Worth childhood, where I first opened my eyes
on the world. This was the start of the trail that would finally lead to
the mountains of New Mexico and our retirement home. ...

Chapter Two: All Those Way Stations

When I married Glenn—that’s what I’ll call him
—I entered a life of perpetual moving. Partly, this
was because of his enormous restlessness, but also it
was just the way things were then.We were a mobile generation. But
we were also a house-minded one. Trading up was the paradigm of
the day. Our minds weren’t on ...

Chapter Three: Something Completely Different

The boys reacted to the news in very different and somewhat
puzzling ways. Alan apparently hadn’t seen this coming at all. Home
for the summer after his first year of college, he went in and out to
his two part-time jobs with a deer-caught-in-the-headlights look.
Doug, for all his limitations, had been more perceptive ...

Part Two: Moving into Retirement

Chapter Four: Deciding to Retire

It was Loren who started us thinking about retirement.
One day in the most casual way, he just dropped
the word—the R word—into our conversation, asking
innocently enough, “When we retire, what do you think we’ll . . .”
Or maybe it was, “I was thinking that after we retire, maybe we’ll
want to . . .” Something like that, ...

Chapter Five: Planning Our House

Planning a house isn’t just a matter of drawing
walls and the location of doors and windows on a
piece of paper or a computer screen. These basics are
important, of course, as are floor coverings and paint colors and all
the other things that go into making a house, and any botched
choice along the way ...

Chapter Six: Leaving

Retiring means leaving. Most obviously, leaving
your job, but also leaving the people you see every day.
You also leave a pattern of life that has structured your
time and energies for a long time, maybe a whole adult lifetime. You
leave that pattern without knowing whether you can find another
one to replace it. ...

Part Three: On Cerro Espinoso

Chapter Seven: Building It

From central Texas to central New Mexico isn’t
just a lot of miles, it’s a lot of difference. From a work
life to a retired life is more difference still. Both retiring
and moving to a new place to build a house are major life
changes—all the more so when they both come at once. ...

Chapter Eight: Being There

Our house on the ridge was a fine place to learn to
be retired. Once we got settled, our days fell into a comfortable
rhythm. I wrote and quilted and read. Loren
wrote and built a shed and read. We met at lunch and talked and
then went back to what we were doing. The hours seemed as spacious
as the high desert country around us. ...

Chapter Nine: People Are More Important

In 1912, the now revered, but then only aspiring,
American novelist Willa Cather made her first visit to
the Southwest. Her brother was stationed in Prescott,
Arizona, with the Santa Fe Railway, and she went for a long visit
with him, hoping to rest up from a hectic six years as editor at
McClure’s Magazine and to find a new ...

Part Four: Back in Texas

Chapter Ten: Building It Again

Now we were not only going to build again, we were going to
build the same house again. I suppose that is something very few people
ever get to do. You hear people say they wish they could live their
life over again and try to get it right—an option not available to any
of us, and it’s probably just as well. But Loren and I did ...

Chapter Eleven: At Home in the Limestone Hill Country

John Graves, in Goodbye to a River, calls this “hardscrabble
country.” He ought to know; he lives here. And
he’s right, that’s what it is. The soil is thin and rocky, the
grass sparse, the brush mostly cedar. Not good country for farming.
The earliest white settlers who stopped their wagons here during a
sequence of wet years ...

Chapter Twelve: A Place to End

Only five years retired, and it seems a perfectly natural
way to live. My days have fallen into a comfortable
rhythm. Yet I know it is not a rhythm that will continue.
The time will come—unless something unforeseen whisks me away
first—when I will move into yet another phase of life, technically a
continuation of the ...

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